The present invention relates to a valve for pressurized media configurated as a cartridge which can be screwed into a valve block for connecting the valve to a pressure medium duct in the valve block, the valve including a valve housing provided with inlet and outlet and formed as a sleeve-like part of the cartridge such as to be screwable into the valve block, there being a main valve plug movably arranged in the housing for infinitely variable control of a pressurized medium flow through the valve in the pressurized medium duct with the aid of a pilot flow originating from the pressurized medium flow governed by a controllable pilot flow valve, the pilot flow passing through a variable pilot flow throttling means situated in the main valve plug.
Valves of the kind mentioned above are already known, even in embodiments for placing in valve blocks to form multifunction valves. In these known embodiments, the pressurized medium valve itself is formed as a unit separated from its associated pilot flow control valve, which is also a separate unit and must thus be mounted separately in the valve block and be connected therein to the pressurized medium valve itself in a manner such that a pilot flow originating from the pressurized medium flow can be controlled by the pilot flow control valve. Any valve block used in this connection must therefore be made with pilot flow ducts from the variable pilot flow throttling means of the valve to the inlet of the pilot valve and from its outlet back to the pressurized medium valve after its outlet. The need of a plurality of such ducts results in complicated manufacture of the valve block and such manufacture cannot be standardized to any great extent, which particularly applies to complicated multifunction valves, e.g. directional valves, which require for their function at least four pressurized medium valves of the type described in the introduction, as well as associated pilot flow control valves and other functional valves which must be also arranged in the valve block and connected to some other appropriate valve for obtaining the intended function.